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| Naomi Wolf - The Tree House |
Noami Wolf - What the Hell!? The Tree House
The feminist who has always made her personal experiences the big story has written a new book about how people need to nurture their inner artist to be happy. Has she got a daddy complex? Mid-life crisis? Is finding the meaning of life the new path of Western feminism? Or are we too hard on feminists? Wolf has been touring Australia promoting her new book - The Treehouse.
http://www.abc.net.au/sundayprofile/stories/s1626329.htm
Oh gosh, you know I kind of have the fortune and misfortune of being largely often in tune with my generation and I think it's part of something larger going on. I know a lot of women and men, I'm 43 who have spent twenty years fighting the good fight and establishing themselves in careers and keeping all the balls in the air, raising a family and doing all the things you're supposed to do and they're hitting a wall now. And they're really asking themselves, "Is there something deeper, is there something more?" These things are very hard to talk about because they're almost by definition difficult to put into words but yes, I don't think I'm alone in thinking, 'Is there more?'
http://www.sundayherald.com/53663
" I am not going to be in the closet about this any more. I'm on a spiritual path, I answer to a higher authority," she says, laughing at the apparent absurdity of the statement. "I don't mean that in a kind of culty way. I'm here on the planet to make change and to help people in the best way that I can. I know what I have to do and if, in the course of doing that, some people get upset, or make fun of me, or attack me, that is not really important in the larger scheme of things." My next question is more cautious. That higher authority, is it God? "Yeah, God. I believe absolutely that every single one of us is here with a spiritual mission. We come in knowing it and then we forget. If we're lucky, we re-remember. That's part of what this book is about, helping people re-listen to their soul because their soul knows exactly what they're supposed to be doing, even if it is not always clear it knows the direction in which to pull."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/06/19/LVGESD6IJ21.DTL
However, as a young feminist and Marxist, Wolf rejected her father's love of the Western literary canon and, more important, his humanism. "He really believes we can all understand each other if we tell stories to each other -- black, white, Muslim, Western," Wolf says. "In my 20s, humanism was very unfashionable, it was all about deconstruction and identity politics. Identity politics says if I'm white, I can't understand what it's like to be black. If you're straight you can't understand what it's like to be gay. All of this made me think, 'My father doesn't have much to teach me.' It wasn't until I turned 40 that I noticed I had questions about how to be happy, and live a meaningful life, and my dad has been teaching students for decades how to be happy and how to have joyful, meaningful lives." "For 15 years I'd been yakking away, but if you're a professional polemicist, you don't develop good listening skills,'' she says. "There were parts of me that my students needed, my kids needed, and my husband needed that weren't growing the way they should. My students at Woodhull don't need me to score points, they need me to nurture their potential. My children don't need me to go to an awards dinner. They need me to just be there to hold them, emotionally." Pursuing his passion has taken Leonard all over. He has taught in 12 universities, lived on both coasts, the South, the Midwest and several countries, including France, Iran and Israel. Naomi remembers fondly a year her family spent van-camping in Europe when she and her brother, Aaron, were tots. "Everyone said, 'How can you do this? There's no washing machines, they'll get infections.' And they just took us, and we did fine, of course. But we had no money. And my dad and mom had just enough money left, one day, for them to take a special trip together. We were playing with other children, with friends of theirs. They went to a nearby French village on the Mediterranean and they had just enough for two perfect plums from the market stall. The sun was shining and they savored these two plums in the sun, by the ocean. My dad said the memory of those perfect plums lasted 43 years." She warns that the current generation is hindered by expectations of affluence more than anything.
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060417&s=fairbanks041706
Over the years, Wolf's brand of feminism has become increasingly hard to pin down. She's reversed her opinions to coincide with the feminist fads of the moment, from "victim feminism," to "power feminism," to a sort of New Age feminism: But, throughout this peripatetic journey, Wolf maintained--and nourished--her mystical bent, her interest in liberating not only women's bodies, minds, and paychecks, but also that final frontier for feminist transformation: their souls.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,,1686542,00.html
A lot of people had high hopes for Naomi Wolf (including Naomi Wolf). Her book was acclaimed by Germaine Greer and much discussed. I can see its cover still: a naked woman folded into a wooden crate, a bandage covering most of her face. But its author was hard to take. It was difficult being told to let it all hang out, physically speaking, by a creature so obviously ... buffed. At least, however, The Beauty Myth was mostly well-researched. Since then, Wolf has written several other books, each one more pious and self-obsessed than the last. Her new effort completes this journey. Where once there were facts, now there is intuition; where once she dished up hot anger, now there is cosiness. Its natural shelf-fellow is not a work by Kate Millet or Betty Friedan; rather, it should be filed beside the cloying tracts of M Scott Peck or John Men Are From Mars Gray. Wolf's new book, The Treehouse, is subtitled 'Eccentric wisdom from my father on how to live, love and see', which pretty much catches it, I'm afraid. Leonard Wolf, Naomi's 80-year-old father, is a poet, teacher and former resident of Haight-Ashbury. They say all girls are a little in love with their daddies; well, Naomi has got it really bad. Feeling that her life has been too frenetic for too long, and having just purchased a darling little wooden house in upstate New York, she invites her father to help her build a treehouse for her young daughter.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7824668/
He changes people's lives because he believes that everyone is here on earth as an artist; to tell his particular story or sing her irreplaceable song; to leave behind a unique creative signature. He believes that your passion for this, your feelings about this, must take priority over every other reasoned demand: status, benefits, sensible practices. This book is about why he believes this, and what this belief does to the people around him. Most of all, it is about the power of the imagination. My dad makes Xerox copies at Kinko's of the phrase Verba volant / Scripta manent - "Spoken words fly away, but writing remains" - meaning, get it down, do your creative work, whatever it is. He passes out the Xeroxes to everyone he thinks needs reminding: his grandchildren, his acquaintances, the guy at the cleaners.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,,1696382,00.html#article_continue
The book runs on three tracks: the self-help advice that makes up the 12 chapter headings, the account of a lyrical summer spent with her poet/ philosopher father, and biographical reminiscences about his life and her own. The treehouse, while actual, also serves as an allegory: "maybe one has to build a treehouse internally", for Wolf is striving to get back to simple things, stripping away the dross of ages to find the clear grain of the wood beneath. These three strands are deftly worked with a lightness of touch that makes for pleasant reading, the family narrative winning out every time on the marshmallow philosophy. And there is at its heart an insight into current American thinking that is truly alarming. The self-help stuff is for the most part routine new age banality: "be still and listen"; "use your imagination"; "destroy the box" (meaning don't conform to the world's expectations); "speak in your own voice"; "identify your heart's desire"; "do nothing without passion"; "be disciplined with your gift"; "pay attention to the details"; "your only wage will be joy"; "mistakes are part of the draft"; "Frame your work" (that is, know when your work is done); and "sign it and let it go". It comes a no surprise to know that her father teaches creative writing, and the book is dedicated "To teachers who help us climb". The relentless search for self-improvement as the way up some metaphysical ladder is one of the motivating forces for modern living and modern publishing, and many Americans embrace it with naive enthusiasm. Books full of such advice pour forth to meet the passionate yearnings of would-be achievers to "do better and be better" (in Emily Brontė's phrase). Wolf is one of the leaders in the field, full of how-to perceptions that perhaps she doesn't always heed herself. But the messages are no less sound for being obvious, and if you're locked in a mediocre job, partnered to the wrong person with no space to pursue your passions, then this book's advice will read like pearls of wisdom. Alternatively you could dismiss it as "all right for some" and turn away in despair. The book's saving grace is the portrait of her father, Leonard Wolf, a "wild visionary poet" of some 80 years whom Naomi clearly adores.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,23110-1979310,00.html
Leonard believes "no amount of money or recognition can compensate you if you are not doing your life's passionate, creative work". This is perfectly true. We all need to stay in touch with our dreams. We all need the nourishment of silent contemplation, simply to look at clouds or listen to the birds. But this is about as far as it goes, and it is incredibly tedious to read. A writer has to be very brilliant and very important to get away with such Fotherington-Thomas waffle. The Wolfs are not geniuses, and their musings are most unlikely to change any lives. Just like those old French peasants, I get a little tetchy when advised to eat cake.
http://www.couriermail.news.com.au/story/0,20797,18946760-5003424,00.html
"I'm interested in a politics that isn't dualistic - that doesn't fit us-them, men-women, white-black. I'm interested in the human ethic politics that's about developing upon the common ground that we all share."
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/05/26/1148524890175.html
She is here to speak at the Sydney Writers' Festival about her latest book, The Treehouse, written the year she turned 40 and bought a ramshackle home. Already she feels an urgency to write the next book, about young girls and the three troubling ideals upholding teen culture: skanky sex, luxury goods and celebrity.
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This feature topic has been collated for the June 2006 Newsletter
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